WUNRN
SHE TAXIS / SHE RIDES - CHANGE
THE CULTURE,NOT CABS - WOMEN-ONLY TAXIS COMMODIFY FEMALE FEAR
10 September
2014 - SHE TAXIS (known as SheRides
in New York City) is a newly-launched app that will help women-only passengers
find women-only taxi drivers. If you are a woman, the creators argue, it makes
sense to use this car service, because taking taxis and Ubers driven by men can
be dangerous. There is a whole lot of money to be made helping women adapt to
this problem.
This
approach to "keeping women safe" is based on the sex segregation
model of harassment and stranger rape avoidance at the heart of women-only
subway cars inJapan and women-only train compartments in India. It's the car version of a million "don't get
raped" products, the latest of which is drug-sensing nail polish that women can paint onto their
fingertips and dip into drinks. Most solutions advocating segregation or
self-defense are variations of "shrink it and pink it" consumer
product and public space design. Even Women.Com, a new social
network designed as a (safe) space for women only, takes this approach -- that
women have to take themselves out of spaces shared by men or risk the
consequences.
The reason many feminists don't embrace these
products and services enthusiastically is that, while they help individual
women avoid rape, none of them prevents rape or other violence that it is often
related to. They don't reduce terror, but diffuse it. They don't dismantle
myths (like the relative risk of stranger sexual assault versus acquaintance
and intimate assault), they capitalize on them. They not only operate within
parameters that accept the violence, but commodify it.
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Two weeks ago, a new nail polish that promised to detect date rape
drugs took the media by storm. The product, developed by four male college
students as a potential tool to address campus sexual assaults, sparked a passionate discussion about the most effective
ways to tackle the issue. And although that conversation has since dissipated,
the growing industry dedicated to anti-rape
products has not.
“There’s this entire little cottage industry of anti-rape
solutions,” Soraya Chemaly, a feminist writer and activist, told ThinkProgress.
“It’s clearly an identifiable market that’s being pursued.”
Inside Higher Ed
recently used the exact same phrase — “cottage
industry” — to refer to the growing number of safety apps being targeted at
young people. At the end of August, just in time for the beginning of the fall
semester, the outlet reported that there are now dozens of
smartphone tools for “worried college students” to download.
With so many new innovations, it may be difficult for the average
American to wade through their options and figure out what’s actually useful.
Do you need an anti-rape app at the ready? Is the solution to campus sexual
violence on a smartphone?
Experts in the field say the answers are complicated.
The
Commodification Of Sexual Assault
The first rule of thumb is to tread cautiously when it comes to
what Chemaly calls the “commodification of sexual assault.”
All of the rape prevention activists who spoke with ThinkProgress
expressed discomfort with the idea that the innovators in this field might be
focused more on profiting than on ending rape. In their minds, resources to
combat sexual assault shouldn’t be for sale.
“I don’t rule out the possibility that there could be an effective
anti-rape effort that would take some sort of business model. That being said,
it makes me really uncomfortable that there could be a tool that would only be
accessible to some people depending on their ability to pay,” Alexandra
Brodsky, one of the founders and current co-directors of Know Your IX,
a survivor-led group working to address campus sexual assault, said.
“It is sort of disturbing to me that there’s this whole industry
popping up, and there are definitely some products that seem like they’re
trying to exploit that,” Nancy Schwartzman, who developed an app called “Circle
of 6u” to help colleges expand their sexual assault resources,
added. “We’ve never been in it for the money.”
There’s also a question of where financial resources are best
allocated. Student-led and grassroots efforts are already working on the ground
to address campus violence. Online organizing campaigns are currently trying to
focus attention on this issue. Victim advocate centers are struggling to get
enough funding from colleges to keep on full-time staff members. Finding ways
to effectively support the existing infrastructure may be more meaningful than
pouring money into the next big smartphone app or roofie-detecting coaster.
“Instead of raising $100,000 on a Kickstarter for the next
anti-rape tool, let’s put that money toward what it costs to process rape kits.
Let’s identify serial rapists,” Chemaly said, pointing to the thousands of rape kits collecting dust because
law enforcement departments don’t have the resources to process them. “Let’s
start a Kickstarter for that!”
Addressing
The Reality Of Rape
One of the biggest issues with anti-rape innovations is that they
often misrepresent the reality of sexual violence. A
very tiny percentage of assaults, for example,
involve the use of date rape drugs. Most college rapes occur between people who
already know each other, at parties and in dorm rooms, not after a stranger
jumps out of the bushes and accosts a girl on campus.
“The tricky thing is that this work is really counter intuitive in
a lot of ways, and that means that well meaning people can end up perpetuating
myths about sexual violence in their attempt to stop the problem,” Brodksy
pointed out. “I think often these apps are designed for a narrative of violence
that just isn’t that prevalent. You have to ask, would this product have helped
a student in the real world, as opposed to this sort of archetypal rape victim
in a movie script?”
The people involved in efforts to develop new tools need to have
done their homework, Brodsky says. They should either have conducted research
into campus rape, consulted with survivors to get feedback about their
proposal, or have personal experience themselves as a survivor of rape or an
activist within the community.
Indeed, when developers take the time to learn more about how
sexual assaults happen, their products end up looking a little different. For
instance, Innovate Against Rape — a project housed in
Carnegie Mellon University’s Integrated Innovation Institution, which encourages people to come up for creative
solutions to social problems — recently created two apps to give students more
resources to report issues they see at parties. The apps, “Night Owl” and “SPOT
a Problem,” were developed after students did extensive research into campus
sexual assaults.
“The people who you go to the party with are very important. So
we’ve built our products around those bystanders,” Donna Sturgess, the
Integrated Innovation Institute’s executive in residence, explained in an
interview with ThinkProgress. “If you expect a woman, ahead of going to a
party, to be doing things like putting pepper spray in her purse — all of those
things actually don’t work when they’re in a social setting and out on the
dance floor.”
The key is creating resources for larger social settings, as well
as including useful data like the contact information for the local rape crisis
center, rather than “Big Brother” tools that promise to protect vulnerable
women against the big bad strangers who might rape them.
“Does this app feel like it’s the sort of patriarchal,
paternalistic, police blue shield thing that says you need constant
surveillance and protection? Or does the tool feel like something that’s
empowering, something you want to use, something that respects your privacy,
something that’s there to help you out?” Schwartzman said.
Can
An App Challenge Rape Culture?
Anti-rape tools are often designed in a way that requires
potential victims to be constantly vigilant — downloading apps, wearing special
nail polish, and always thinking about ways to mitigate their risk of sexual
assault. They’re criticized for feeding into rape culture by assuming that it’s
women’s responsibility to take extra steps to prevent rape.
Some advocates believe there’s value in those technologies anyway.
Scott Berkowitz, the president of the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network
(RAINN), is one of those people. “I think the way that debate has gone has been
unfortunate, because all crime prevention puts the onus on someone other than
the perpetrator. It’s vastly easier to affect the behavior of the good people
than the bad,” Berkowitz said. “Even bystander intervention programs, the kind
of programs everyone is moving toward right now, put the onus on other people —
I don’t think that’s a bad thing.”
This past spring, RAINN made headlines for a similar criticism: Lamenting the “unfortunate trend towards
blaming ‘rape culture’ for the extensive problem of sexual violence on
campuses,” which RAINN believes detracts from the emphasis on rapists’
conscious choice to commit a crime.
Others firmly disagree. “Every solution is going to have its
downsides, and that doesn’t mean everything that’s criticized should be totally
cast off,” Brodsky said. “But some of these tools, as we saw with the anti-rape
nail polish, are only going to potentially help a tiny fraction of people —
while also solidifying a really dangerous narrative of violence and of
responsibility that is going to affect all people.”
And some groups think they’ve found a way to carefully navigate
that space. Schwartzman — whose Circle of 6 app allows users to select a group
of six friends to easily contact if they wind up in a situation they need help
getting out of — says her app can help facilitate culture change by requiring
friends to discuss the responsibilities that come with being in each other’s
“circles.” That requires them to broach the topic of healthy sexual
relationships with peers and practice how to be an effective bystander in
social situations.
“It’s not just like, I need help and I’m going to get it because I
have this mobile app,” she explained. “You have six people who you’ve had a
pretty in depth conversation with about what it means to be accountable to each
other — and those people might have six other people, and all of a sudden we’re
looking at these concentric circles of caring and community.”
Chemaly thinks that’s the key. “It’s not as focused on personal
responsibility — these type of tech innovations are actually engaged in
challenging how we socialize,” she said in reference to Circle of 6. “Nail
polish doesn’t do that at all.”
Schwartzman and her colleagues also recently rolled out Circle
of 6u, a version of the app that can be tailored specifically for universities to
offer students hyper-localized resources. They’ve already partnered with
Shifting
The Narrative
Many of the advocates who spoke to ThinkProgress agreed that,
while technological innovations might be part of the larger fight against
sexual violence, they’re not a silver bullet to end rape.
“Sexual violence is a global systemic problem that is not going to
be solved by pressing a button,” Brodsky said. “If we shifted our outlook so
that communities were actively calling out perpetrators and supporting
survivors, we could see real social change. That is much larger than an app.”
Others were more optimistic about technology’s potential. “We want
people to think about this as a fixable problem. Our interest is making the
conversation bigger and louder,” Donna Sturgess, who leads Innovate Against
Rape, explained. “It’s a clarion call to say, stand up for this issue and help
us create solutions.”
This industry typically serves as the nexus where very different
worldviews about rape prevention end up clashing sharply. Often, the activists
on the ground oppose what they see as ineffective tools that don’t get to the
heart of the deeper cultural problem. Meanwhile, the people who are excited
about new innovations become frustrated that attempts to prevent sexual assault
are being hampered by political correctness.
“It’s really hard for some people to understand why anyone, and
especially feminists, would reject a new product like anti-rape nail polish —
how could you reject something that could help stop rape?” Chemaly said. “But
those people are thinking about their individual safety, their children’s
safety, and not interested in all in attacking the systems that create the
larger problem. That’s not rape prevention, but rape avoidance.”
As the recent coverage around the new nail polish demonstrates, broader society won’t be coming to an agreement on the matter anytime soon. But there are perhaps less contentious ways to work on improving the way that society approaches sexual violence. Innovations don’t necessarily have to focus on the prevention side. Efforts to ease the reporting process — something that survivors often say is traumatizing for them — could help encourage more people to file reports for incidences of sexual violence. For instance, a new reporting software program called Callisto, currently being developed with input from college rape survivors, seeks to give students more agency by allowing them to file an online report anonymously. It’s been widely praised so far.
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